Big number, big body: Jersey numbers alter body size perception

Vision has been shown to be an active process that can be shaped by top-down influences. Here, we add to this area of research by showing a surprising example of how visual perception can be affected by cognition (i.e., cognitive penetration). Observers were presented, on each trial, with a picture of a computer-generated football player and asked to rate the slenderness of the player on an analog scale. The results of two experiments showed that observers perceived athletes wearing small jersey numbers as more slender than those with high numbers. This finding suggests that the cognition of numbers quantitatively alters body size perception. We conjecture that this effect is the result of previously learned associations (i.e., prior expectations) affecting perceptual inference. Such associations are likely the result of implicit learning of the statistical regularities of number and size attributes co-occurrences by the nervous system. We discuss how these results are consistent with previous research on statistical learning and how they fit into the Bayesian framework of perception. The current finding supports the notion of top-down influences of cognition on perception.